Congress established the U.S. Sentence Commission under the judicial arm of the government in 1984 to lessen sentencing inequalities and advance openness and proportionality in sentencing. The commission is a bipartisan, independent organization.
What is fifteen years of guideline sentencing?
The SRA's orders, additional statutory provisions, a review of prior sentencing practices, and the Commission's guidelines all served as the foundation for these regulations.
The Commission examined comprehensive data from 10,000 presentence reports as well as other information on more than 100,000 federal sentences that were handed out in the recent past.
The Commission calculated the typical jail time that will likely be served for each general category of crime
For each crime, these averages assisted in establishing "base offense levels," which were correlated with suggested jail terms.
Statistics were used to evaluate each factor's size as well as aggravating and mitigating factors that strongly linked with increases or decreases in sentencing.
These served as the foundation for each sort of crime's "particular offense characteristics.This raised or lowered the offensive level.
When the Commission found a compelling basis to depart from previous practice, such as the historical under-punishment of white collar offenses, or when Congress mandated heightened severity for a particular infraction category, it did so.
In order to determine which criminals were most likely to recidivate, the Commission also took their criminal histories into account when developing the criteria.
